He is soaping and washing down his Mercedes. He spots you and begins to talk baseball as the hose goes this way and that.

“They’re going to be all right,” he says of the New York Mets, who had lost three series on the way to a stirring coronation in Cincinnati as division champs. “The starting pitching, that’s a little shaky. They don’t condition these kids to go nine innings now.”

He scrubs the hood.

“Without the trades that Sandy Alderson made,” Mr. Hernandez says, referring to the moves made by the team’s general manager around the trade deadline, “we’d be going nowhere. We would be playing meaningless baseball, just like last year.”

With that recently restored mustache and the gray-tinged looks of a 61-year-old conquistador, Mr. Hernandez knows meaningless games. The Mets are intermittently good and often bad. On a long day’s journey into mediocrity, you yearn for entertaining company, and the former Mets first baseman, his friend and former Mets pitcher Ron Darling, and the lead announcer Gary Cohen provide just that for those who watch their game broadcasts on the SNY network.

They debate, crack jokes and digress without losing sight of the game. During an endless extra-inning affair, a cameraman found a fan asleep in the bleachers. “I’d like to trade places with that guy,” Mr. Hernandez said.

Another time the camera focused on a young man and his buxom girlfriend, eating two footlong hot dogs.

“My goodness,” Mr. Hernandez said.

Mr. Cohen, the maestro of this team, jumped on it. “How much meat is in a $25 hot dog? I mean, a few pounds, right?”

“I wasn’t talking about the hot dog,” Mr. Hernandez replied.

A silence followed.

A star first baseman in 1986, the best season in Mets history, Mr. Hernandez was a reluctant television recruit. An agent nagged; he relented. He had to do something or he would lose his mind.

Photo

Mr. Hernandez in the SNY broadcast booth at Citi Field.Credit
Yana Paskova for The New York Times

The Wilpon family, the main owner of the team and of SNY, did not want homers — those announcers who scream themselves silly when the home team wins. They sought observant eyes and sardonic and witty voices with a serrated edge, which is a pretty good way of describing New Yorkers.

Mr. Hernandez leads you into his backyard, with a shimmering pool and hot tub and six speakers camouflaged in his English garden. He sets no interview ground rules; his style is offhand stream of consciousness, with a shot of congenital candor.

In the day, he was a studious hitter, a guy who took pride in knowing when to pull a shot into the right-field corner and when to rifle a run-scoring single through the gap between shortstop and third base.

He fielded with balletic ease and ran the bases smartly, if never swiftly. He is acerbic in an amiable fashion about today’s players, whom he tries to call “young men” rather than “the kids.” He admires the catcher Travis d’Arnaud; in the rookie Michael Conforto, he sees a potential star. As for the new star of the team, Yoenis Cespedes? Sign him!

Under Mr. Alderson, the Mets have made a fetish of taking pitches, in hopes of drawing walks and pushing up the on-base average. The passivity bugs Mr. Hernandez.

“The kids today are regimented,” he says. “We’ve imposed conformity on them. I would have been labeled a bad seed, a malcontent.”

“If the hitting coaches walked up the Golden Gate Bridge and jumped off, all the hitters would follow them.”

He grabs a handful of walnuts. “I have a natural tendency to resist conformity.”

He gets sabermetrics, the square-of-the-hypotenuse meets Einstein’s Theory of Fastball relativity stuff. Statistical analysis has revolutionized baseball, transforming young men who might otherwise be accountants. Mr. Alderson is a devotee and sometimes duels with Mr. Hernandez.

They talked once in the general manager’s office. Mr. Alderson laid out spread sheets of Mr. Hernandez’s at-bats on his desk.

“He says, ‘Keith, we’re just looking for hitters like you,’ ” Mr. Hernandez says. “I told him: ‘Sandy, I had a good eye but I didn’t go up there looking to walk. I swung the bat.’ ”

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He acknowledges he has a sweet life these days. Luigi Tagliasacchi, the owner and chef at Cappelletti, a fine Italian joint in Sag Harbor, makes dietetic penne for him. On evenings off (Mr. Hernandez works 115 games), he migrates to that nearby whaling-era fixture, the American Hotel, where he chats with artists, writers, the blue collar and the deeply wealthy. He and Billy Joel once passed an evening there on the veranda.

Mr. Hernandez landed in New York in the 1970s with the St. Louis Cardinals, a West Coast kid in Sodom and Gomorrah. A Cardinals coach took him to Seventh Avenue and pointed north to Central Park. “Don’t go there.” He pointed south to Times Square. “Don’t go there.” He pointed west to Hell’s Kitchen. “Don’t go there.”

Mr. Hernandez remained at the hotel bar. The international airlines booked the same hotel as the ballplayers. “It was always Air France, and their stewardesses would come down to the bar for pops.” He shrugged. “You could call that my education.”

He married early, had three girls and got divorced. When he was traded to the Mets in 1983, he moved to Manhattan and discovered a world of possibility. He remarried last decade and moved to Sag Harbor. “That marriage is kaput,” Mr. Hernandez says.

He has picked up the pieces. He has a beloved Bengal tiger cat. And he is dating, leave it at that.

In the living room, he shows you his books — he loves Victor Hugo, Jack London and Joseph Conrad, and he will embark on “Moby-Dick” in the off-season. He has $30,000 Italian speakers. He began as a “ ’60s rocker,” he said: Jimi, Cream, the Stones, Led Zeppelin. His tastes have expanded to Sinatra, Ella, Miles and Willie Nelson.

Bobby Zarem, the ubiquitous publicist, took him to the opera. They knocked on Plácido Domingo’s backstage door. The tenor sat on a throne and threw up his arms: “Keith! I have a cold. I sang like a .230 hitter tonight. Next time I’ll be a .300 hitter.”

Former President Richard Nixon once visited the Mets locker room. The photograph is on a bureau: the former president in a suit and tie and Keith naked from the waist up. They shared lunches. Nixon wanted to talk about the stars of the ’86 team — Lenny Dykstra, Mookie Wilson, Dwight Gooden. One day Mr. Hernandez blurted out: “Mr. President, all we do is talk baseball. Could we talk politics?”

“He went on for 45 minutes about Russia and China.”

Mr. Hernandez spends winters in Juno Beach, Fla. It’s a little boring, he says. So why does he go there? He waggles his eyebrows. “Taxes, obviously.”

At 1:45 p.m., he takes a nap. Then we hop into his Mercedes-Benz 2006 C-Class after he decides to leave the blue BMW behind, saying: “That’s a dangerous car. It wants to go 90 miles an hour.”

During the 86-mile drive through the marshes of eastern Long Island to Citi Field, he tunes in Mike Francesa, the afternoon yakker on WFAN. The callers are wearing out Matt Harvey, the Mets ace pitcher, who is in his recovery year from reconstructive elbow surgery and limiting the number of innings he pitches. The callers are unforgiving: a coward, a phony.

His politics lean conservative. He likes Carly Fiorina. “She is smart,” he says. “I think she can play with the boys. Margaret Thatcheresque.”

But in his playing days, he was a baseball union man. Careers are short and often tragic. “I appreciate Harvey’s worry,” he says. “You’ve worked your whole life to become a major leaguer. A pitcher’s arm goes, and they’re done.”

Still, Mr. Hernandez never liked Mr. Harvey’s embrace of his highly marketable nickname, the Dark Knight. “I warned Scott Boras” — Mr. Harvey’s agent, who worked with Mr. Hernandez — “that this would come back to bite Harvey,” he says. “He built himself up to be something unreal.”

We turn into the Gil Hodges gate. Attendants wave at him. He walks through the stadium past the woman guarding the visiting team locker room. She smiles. He waves and says, over his shoulder, “Just 12 days left in the season.”

The season, the daily drives, can be a grind. He stands outside his broadcast booth. On the field, players swing, balls arcing toward distant walls. A couple of women check him out. He appears not to notice, although he probably does.

“I mean, how bad is this?” he says. “I am paid handsomely, with six months off, and it’s baseball. Not bad, right?”